Resist cultivation or have some other undesirable properties. Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
A favorite example of mine: oak’s acorns are sometimes edible. Roughly one in ten oaks produce edible acorns. They are indistinguishable from inedible ones unless you try them out - but inedible ones are fairly poisonous. The gene for edible acorns is recessive and it takes at least a decade before you know if a newly planted oak produces edible acorns or not, with a 10% probability of the former. It is just practically impossible to select for this criterion. Thus, we don’t eat acorns.
Isn’t acorn flour edible after you rinse out the toxins? Some north american tribes did essentially “farm” acorns (They managed groves of oak) and iirc that’s how they dealt with the toxicity.
Acorns are like the easiest thing to forage, though. I agree that foraging isn’t as simple for many people as the OP makes it out to be, but acorns are a bad counter example.
They are high in tannins, which your body is pretty good at processing in reasonable quantities (they’re in tea, coffee, and wine), but many acorns DO have unreasonable quantities of them and they can cause organ damage. Luckily, tannins are water soluble, so you just need to crack them open and soak them in water for a few days, then rinse and they’re safe to eat.
I mean, I think that goes back to the whole “industrial farming” point. If it can’t be farmed, it won’t be commercially available. But there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge, if you knew what to look for.
One of my personal favorite niche plants is osha root. It’s one of the best cures for a sore throat. It tastes a little bit like dirty root beer, and it’ll numb your entire throat when you chew on it. Native Americans kept some around for medicine. You can even grind it up and smear it on shallow scrapes to numb the area. You can find it in teas like Throat Coat, which is a sort of secret weapon for performers and public speakers whenever they have a sore throat.
But it can’t be commercially farmed, because it exclusively grows in the Rocky Mountains where a specific type of fungus helps it thrive. It isn’t commercially viable to market to the masses like throat lozenges, (even though it is just as effective in reducing sore throats) because it has to be scavenged.
there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge
But what happens when “you” becomes a million people? A hundred million people? A billion people? Where I live, we can’t even have a nice field of flowers because a hundred Instagram models will trample and ruin it before spring is over. Scavenging and foraging literally cannot feed the 7 billion human mouths on this planet.
My point wasn’t that commercial farming is bad. With 8 billion people on the planet, it’s a necessity. My point was simply that scavenging to supplant your needs should be more encouraged, and the knowledge should be passed down.
If you have a garden (I recommend far from the street to avoid pollution), some wild plants will grow in it. It’s good to know which ones you can eat and to be able to distinguish them from poisonnous ones. This way, weeding can become a sort of harvest.
No, obviously it is just the most profitable, which is the only thing that matters under capitalism. With better planning we could totally use sustainable farming techniques, and have comparable yields.
And I don’t know what you are on about with cities. Cities are the densest, and thus most efficient way of human settlement. Other forms of settlement are less dense, therefore require more land, therefore leave less land for agriculture (and result in higher transportation costs) which means agriculture has to have higher yield per unit of area.
Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.
City people are crazy lol.
Rabbit hutches are the most efficient way to keep rabbits. They piss and shit on themselves and on top of each other, live sad and miserable lives, and require synthetic food being directly delivered to them. Just like human cities :D
Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you. I barely have to go to the grocery store or farmer’s market for my vegetables.
Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.
Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.
Ultimately if we want for 8 billion people to survive on this planet, we have to be somewhat efficient. If you spread out all current human population to a typical rural density (100/km^2) you get 80E6 km^2, or about all habitable land mass on earth. This leaves no areas for anything but human settlement. What you are advocating for is an infinite sprawling suburbia with not even a national park in between, which just sounds like a hellscape.
This is not taking into account that this will require everyone to use transportation to get anywhere (rather than a well-planned city where all daily destinations are a 5-10 minute walk), and transportation at those scales won’t be efficient either - if we go with cars we get a network constantly jammed, insanely polluting highways, if we go with rail it would either take an insane amount of rail or the “last mile” would actually be 10 km with little to no infrastructure. In any case it would take an insane amount of time when you need to go somewhere uncommon, like a medical professional specializing in your rare disease, or a DnD hangout, or a scientific conference, whatever.
Other essential services will also be very inefficient like electricity (imagine just how much wiring we would need), or water supply and sewage (which requires piping and dedicated sewage treatment facilities), or emergency response (imagine the amount of deaths because we can’t staff enough emergency stations to cover all the sprawl).
I’m not just talking about efficiency in the capitalist sense of profit, I’m talking about the basic sense of the amount of resources required to keep humans alive. We simply will not be able to sustain everyone living in a rural-like setting with a modern quality of life (like access to modern medicine, electricity, running water and internet). There is not enough land and resources on this planet to live like that. The fact that you and other people can do that is because they are (indirectly) subsidized by the city folk, mostly so that there is someone to work all those out-of-town agriculture jobs.
Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you.
If you grow your own vegetables, you’re using more land for your vegetables than if you bought them from someone else, because economies of scale make agriculture much more efficient. And in any case I grow some tomatoes and celery on my balcony, you can do that in a city too with proper planning.
Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.
Have you ever been to a well-planned car-free (or at least less-car-infested) city? It can be a quiet cozy place with lots of communities forming, lots of green spaces, and access to nature within 10-15 minutes by train. The thing you hate about cities is probably not cities, it’s cars and car-centric planning with suburban sprawl (which is ironically what you seem to be advocating for).
I’ve also lived a big chunk of my life in the forest, and I wanna do that again because I like forests. But I won’t pretend it’s sustainable for all humans to live like that. This must be the last refuge for those who truly love nature and/or want to work agriculture, which is a very low percentage of the overall population.
I think the point is it doesn’t prevent wide spread use. If a plant resists cultivation then it’s not worth it to try to farm, either industrially or in your back yard. Especially if you’re trying to farm for sustenance.
Lamb’s lettuce superiority! They don’t need cultivation, grow everywhere even if you don’t want them to grow, and they are quite edible, also delicious.
This is dumb. Most plants resist cultivation. Bragging about being able to afford them does not make you Superior.
Also yields are important
Resist cultivation or have some other undesirable properties. Often low yield, short harvest, low yield, difficult picking or transporting.
A favorite example of mine: oak’s acorns are sometimes edible. Roughly one in ten oaks produce edible acorns. They are indistinguishable from inedible ones unless you try them out - but inedible ones are fairly poisonous. The gene for edible acorns is recessive and it takes at least a decade before you know if a newly planted oak produces edible acorns or not, with a 10% probability of the former. It is just practically impossible to select for this criterion. Thus, we don’t eat acorns.
And let’s not forget, low yield.
Let us not!
Low yield due to overly specific conditions that are hardly met
Low yield due to short production window
Low yield due to long growth time
Low yield just because
Not sure that acorns are inedible. They just need to be processed.
You just remove the tannins by soaking them, it’s not really a major problem. I tried it before, they were fine but fairly bland.
Also acorns ain’t particularly nutritious.
Isn’t acorn flour edible after you rinse out the toxins? Some north american tribes did essentially “farm” acorns (They managed groves of oak) and iirc that’s how they dealt with the toxicity.
Acorns are like the easiest thing to forage, though. I agree that foraging isn’t as simple for many people as the OP makes it out to be, but acorns are a bad counter example.
They are high in tannins, which your body is pretty good at processing in reasonable quantities (they’re in tea, coffee, and wine), but many acorns DO have unreasonable quantities of them and they can cause organ damage. Luckily, tannins are water soluble, so you just need to crack them open and soak them in water for a few days, then rinse and they’re safe to eat.
I thought we eat acorns after processing them? There are cuisines which involve acorns as main ingredient.
Let the deer and squirrels and wild pigs eat the acorns, then eat the deer and squirrels and wild pigs. Easy!
I mean, I think that goes back to the whole “industrial farming” point. If it can’t be farmed, it won’t be commercially available. But there are plenty of plants that you could scavenge, if you knew what to look for.
One of my personal favorite niche plants is osha root. It’s one of the best cures for a sore throat. It tastes a little bit like dirty root beer, and it’ll numb your entire throat when you chew on it. Native Americans kept some around for medicine. You can even grind it up and smear it on shallow scrapes to numb the area. You can find it in teas like Throat Coat, which is a sort of secret weapon for performers and public speakers whenever they have a sore throat.
But it can’t be commercially farmed, because it exclusively grows in the Rocky Mountains where a specific type of fungus helps it thrive. It isn’t commercially viable to market to the masses like throat lozenges, (even though it is just as effective in reducing sore throats) because it has to be scavenged.
But what happens when “you” becomes a million people? A hundred million people? A billion people? Where I live, we can’t even have a nice field of flowers because a hundred Instagram models will trample and ruin it before spring is over. Scavenging and foraging literally cannot feed the 7 billion human mouths on this planet.
8 billion now.
If it can’t be farmed there cannot be enough for everyone, but it will be exclusive to a select few. How they are selected is irrelevant.
My point wasn’t that commercial farming is bad. With 8 billion people on the planet, it’s a necessity. My point was simply that scavenging to supplant your needs should be more encouraged, and the knowledge should be passed down.
Most people live in large cities where this is not feasible for everyone at once. Also transportation is expensive.
If you have a garden (I recommend far from the street to avoid pollution), some wild plants will grow in it. It’s good to know which ones you can eat and to be able to distinguish them from poisonnous ones. This way, weeding can become a sort of harvest.
Our current style of industrialized agriculture isn’t viable long-term (meaning: millenia); too much damage to the ecosystem.
It’s the kind of farming you need in order to provide for the high density
rabbit hutchescities that are supposed to save the planetNo, obviously it is just the most profitable, which is the only thing that matters under capitalism. With better planning we could totally use sustainable farming techniques, and have comparable yields.
And I don’t know what you are on about with cities. Cities are the densest, and thus most efficient way of human settlement. Other forms of settlement are less dense, therefore require more land, therefore leave less land for agriculture (and result in higher transportation costs) which means agriculture has to have higher yield per unit of area.
Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.
City people are crazy lol.
Rabbit hutches are the most efficient way to keep rabbits. They piss and shit on themselves and on top of each other, live sad and miserable lives, and require synthetic food being directly delivered to them. Just like human cities :D
Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you. I barely have to go to the grocery store or farmer’s market for my vegetables.
Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.
Ultimately if we want for 8 billion people to survive on this planet, we have to be somewhat efficient. If you spread out all current human population to a typical rural density (100/km^2) you get 80E6 km^2, or about all habitable land mass on earth. This leaves no areas for anything but human settlement. What you are advocating for is an infinite sprawling suburbia with not even a national park in between, which just sounds like a hellscape.
This is not taking into account that this will require everyone to use transportation to get anywhere (rather than a well-planned city where all daily destinations are a 5-10 minute walk), and transportation at those scales won’t be efficient either - if we go with cars we get a network constantly jammed, insanely polluting highways, if we go with rail it would either take an insane amount of rail or the “last mile” would actually be 10 km with little to no infrastructure. In any case it would take an insane amount of time when you need to go somewhere uncommon, like a medical professional specializing in your rare disease, or a DnD hangout, or a scientific conference, whatever.
Other essential services will also be very inefficient like electricity (imagine just how much wiring we would need), or water supply and sewage (which requires piping and dedicated sewage treatment facilities), or emergency response (imagine the amount of deaths because we can’t staff enough emergency stations to cover all the sprawl).
I’m not just talking about efficiency in the capitalist sense of profit, I’m talking about the basic sense of the amount of resources required to keep humans alive. We simply will not be able to sustain everyone living in a rural-like setting with a modern quality of life (like access to modern medicine, electricity, running water and internet). There is not enough land and resources on this planet to live like that. The fact that you and other people can do that is because they are (indirectly) subsidized by the city folk, mostly so that there is someone to work all those out-of-town agriculture jobs.
If you grow your own vegetables, you’re using more land for your vegetables than if you bought them from someone else, because economies of scale make agriculture much more efficient. And in any case I grow some tomatoes and celery on my balcony, you can do that in a city too with proper planning.
Have you ever been to a well-planned car-free (or at least less-car-infested) city? It can be a quiet cozy place with lots of communities forming, lots of green spaces, and access to nature within 10-15 minutes by train. The thing you hate about cities is probably not cities, it’s cars and car-centric planning with suburban sprawl (which is ironically what you seem to be advocating for).
I’ve also lived a big chunk of my life in the forest, and I wanna do that again because I like forests. But I won’t pretend it’s sustainable for all humans to live like that. This must be the last refuge for those who truly love nature and/or want to work agriculture, which is a very low percentage of the overall population.
Isn’t that what they meant by industrial agriculture preventing widespread use?
I think the point is it doesn’t prevent wide spread use. If a plant resists cultivation then it’s not worth it to try to farm, either industrially or in your back yard. Especially if you’re trying to farm for sustenance.
Lamb’s lettuce superiority! They don’t need cultivation, grow everywhere even if you don’t want them to grow, and they are quite edible, also delicious.